[Developers] New user with MQL question

[Andi Vajda]

On Apr 17, 2009, at 12:03, Alex Genadinik <genadinik at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Thank you very much for your responses.  So if I was to use the  
> search API to be able to get results for "The Police" without  
> knowing the Freebase ID for that topic, what would the URL look like  
> for this?

See the docs at http://www.freebase.com/api/service/search?help

> There would still be an MQL search string in the URL, correct?

No, not necessarily. Unless you want data
returned in your search not returned by the
default mql_output parameter.

To start, try:
http://www.freebase.com/api/service/search?query=the+police&indent=1

Andi..

>
> Thank you very much,
> Alex
>
> Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:10:09 -0400
> From: narphorium at gmail.com
> To: developers at freebase.com
> Subject: Re: [Developers] New user with MQL question
>
> There seem to be two parts to this question. First, you would like  
> to be able to get results for "The Police" without knowing the  
> Freebase ID for that topic. Second, you would like to get a list of  
> attributes for that topic without knowing the specific property IDs.
>
> The first part is a bit difficult because Freebase currently has 14  
> different topics called "The Police". That's why it's a lot easier  
> to narrow down the results if you know which Freebase type you're  
> looking for. Another alternative is to use the Freebase Search API  
> which will give you a list of topics about "The Police" sorted in  
> order of relevance. You should be able to get reasonably good  
> results by just taking the first result that you get back from the  
> search API as long as you're only dealing with popular topics like  
> The Police (the band).
>
> The second part is much more straight-forward and can be done by  
> searching for all the links (/type/link) that are attached to the  
> topic that you're interested in. I wrote up a brief description of  
> how to do it over at StackOverflow a couple weeks ago.
>
> Shawn
>
> Alex Genadinik wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am new to the list and am experimenting with freebase.  I am  
> looking at MQL
> and I think the biggest question I have is that sometimes I do not  
> know the URI or the path
> of the topic I am querying for.  I just want to throw in a term like  
> "The Police" and
> get back results about them without having to provide the path / 
> music/album
>
> Is that possible in MQL?  How would I do that?
>
> Sincerely,
> Alex Genadinik
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